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The Egocentric Predicament

Thomas Nagel

The False Prison: A Study of the Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy, Vol. II by David Pears
Oxford, 355 pp, £29.50, November 1988, ISBN 0 19 824487 8

When I was an undergraduate at Cornell in the Fifties, it was the only American university where Wittgenstein’s later work was the object of intensive study. He had died in 1951 and Philosophical Investigations was published in 1953. I remember in those pre-xerox days sharing with some fellow students the typing of The Blue Book and The Brown Book in multiple carbons, from a set available in Ithaca – pre-Investigations texts dating from the mid-Thirties which circulated in samizdat until they were finally published in 1960 as part of the still continuing stream of volumes from the Nachlass.[1]

The atmosphere surrounding the study of Wittgenstein was both thrilling and stifling: philosophy was agony, and it was necessary to immerse yourself in problems so deep you could hardly breathe. Superficiality was the great danger; nothing could be achieved without struggle, either in approaching the problems or in understanding what Wittgenstein said. Above all, there was the sense that it was almost impossibly difficult to express the truth – witness Wittgenstein’s own failure to publish all but a fraction of the huge volume of material he wrote after returning to philosophy at the age of 40, so that, except for the Investigations, he stands in a peculiar relation of diminished responsibility to it.

I still think this attitude is basically right. There is no way to approach Wittgenstein except by getting mired up to your ears in apparently insoluble philosophical problems, and then seeing whether the places where he suggests you put your feet actually enable you to walk. Today Wittgenstein’s name is dropped everywhere as the symbol of an easygoing conceptual relativism, and references to the Private Language Argument and Forms of Life are almost as common as references to the Heisenberg Indeterminacy Principle. But that is a cultural curiosity: Wittgenstein’s work is scarcely more accessible now than it was thirty-five years ago. It is too easy to embrace the solutions without understanding the problems. As David Pears observes, ‘when we read one of Wittgenstein’s discussions of philosophical illusions, there are two things which we may not find it easy to hold together in our minds simultaneously, his success in dispelling them and the depth and difficulty of the problems that produced them.’ In this second volume of a formidable two-volume study, Pears tries to provide access to Wittgenstein’s later work through the deep traditional problems to which it is a response – the response of trying to find a way out. This means that the book is difficult. Pears is not an agoniser either temperamentally or stylistically, but he is true to his subject, and while there are things to disagree with, those who work through it will gain a sense of Wittgenstein’s depth and radicalism.

In line with his title, Pears traces the development of Wittgenstein’s thought largely in relation to a theme that has been central in Western philosophy since Descartes, and which Wittgenstein found in Schopenhauer: the suspicion that we are trapped inside our own minds and that nothing we can do in the way of language, thought, imagination or perception will enable us to reach beyond them. Descartes thought of this as a problem about what we can know. He assumed that we could at least form the conception of an external world: the issue was whether we could know anything about it or not. But in the development of modern philosophy through Kant, this evolved into an even more radical doubt about what we can think. Even if there is a world beyond our minds, there seems no way for anything in our experience to make contact with it or represent it as it is in itself, so that the reach of our thought is limited to our own actual or possible experiences, including the experiences of ‘external’ perception.

This position is unstable, however. If even our thoughts cannot reach beyond our minds, the idea of an unreachable world beyond is a conceptual illusion: no such thought is possible; anything we take for the thought of what is unthinkable by us must be something else, or gibberish. We cannot say that we can think of the world only as it appears to us, because the implied contrast is meaningless.

In Wittgenstein’s first book, the Tractates Logico-Philosophicus (1921), this result is embodied in the position that solipsism coincides with pure realism. Everything in the world is equally real – from my sense impressions to the stars – but still the world is my world. This shows itself in the fact that however objectively I describe the world (including gaps to be filled in by the things that I don’t know, and even if that objective description affords no privileged position to the particular person I am), I can always add redundantly: ‘And it is I who am saying and thinking this.’ ‘Everything in the world’ is an expression of my language. Yet I cannot think that I am trapped, for that would require, impossibly, forming the thought of what was unthinkable by me.

The Tractatus offered a general theory of language and thought, and of their relation to the rest of reality. Wittgenstein’s later writings reject the possibility of any such theory, in favour of piecemeal description of samples from the great variety of linguistic and mental activities of which humans are capable. But the egocentric predicament remains a central occupation. Wittgenstein continually raises and attempts to dissolve doubt about the adequacy of our language and thought to reach the world it aims to grasp. The details of his response depend on the particular kind of thought he is discussing – about the physical world, other minds, mathematics, action, sensation, meaning. But the general strategy is to make clear an unintelligibility in such doubts that is quite simple: if they are expressible, they must be wrong. If I say, ‘How is it possible that by merely saying the word “Aristotle” I should be able to refer to Aristotle?’ I seem to have forgotten the beginning of the sentence by the time I get to the end – since the second occurrence of the name has to refer to Aristotle for the question to have any sense. I can’t grab hold of Aristotle himself by some kind of super-linguistic reference, against which it is then possible to criticise the ordinary natural conditions of application of the name as inadequate to their purpose.

The same problem of intelligibility arises if I ask how by using the word ‘plus’ I can capture the operation of addition, which is a function defined over all of the infinite possible pairs of numbers, only a small sample of which I shall ever encounter – or the question of whether my ascription of pain to other people really picks out pain, as opposed to some other sensation, or nothing at all. How are the second halves of these questions supposed to be understood, if the questions are serious?

The full text of this book review is only available to subscribers of the London Review of Books.

[1] Even other people’s lecture notes are being published, most recently Wittgenstein’s Lectures on Philosophical Psychology 1946-47: notes by P.T. Geach, K.J. Shah and A.C. Jackson, edited by P.T. Geach (Harvester, 348 pp., £35, November 1988, 0 85527 526 X). These are three sets of notes from the same lectures, together with discussion, and give some sense of what Wittgenstein was like in action. They remind one also that while the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a genuine treatise, Wittgenstein’s later writings are more like a distilled version of the bizarre, disconnected activity of philosophical thought and discussion itself – which in most writers results in a highly-structured product unrecognisably different from the process that produced it.

[2]Philosophical Review, July 1968. Pears rightly stresses the importance of these notes, written by Wittgenstein in English between 1934 and 1936, which appear to contain the first appearance of the Private Language Argument.

[3]Wittgenstein, A Life: Young Ludwig (1889-1921) – unsympathetically reviewed in these pages by George Steiner (23 June 1988), who reveals that he has not read the book through (‘One looks in vain for any mention of Fritz Mauthner’), and seems particularly annoyed not to have learned anything about Wittgenstein’s sex life.

Letters

There is a fatal objection to the social interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language which seems to have escaped the notice of some of his expositors. If A cannot use a sign S to refer to an object O unless he is already aware that B and C are so using it, and if B cannot so use it without already being aware that A and C are doing so, and if C cannot use it without already being aware that A and B are doing so, reference is made impossible. Obviously this use of language cannot get started. If A draws a picture of a bison on the walls of his cave he will be encouraged if his fellow tribesmen immediately reach for their spears, but if we deny him the possibility of expressing his previous private intention to start a hunt, we leave them with nothing to encourage.

While I agree in principle with A.J. Ayer (Letters, 22 June) that there are many problems which beset our attempts to make sense of Wittgenstein’s views on the social character of language, I very much doubt whether the one he mentions can be among them, since the collaborative picture of meaning that Ayer makes trouble for rests upon the notion of a private language which was anathema to Wittgenstein.

The problem is supposed to be that A can’t know what he means by a word unless he knows what B and C mean by it, and B can’t know what he means unless he knows what A and C mean, and so on. How exactly does this affect Wittgenstein’s doctrines? Wittgenstein believed that there was a way of meaning something by a word which neither was a matter of interpretation nor depended on consultation with one’s fellows. ‘Meaning is the last interpretation.’ The novice who observes the practice of others will, after some time, be inclined to join in, and only then can we suppose he attaches a meaning (or tries to attach a meaning) to the words the others use. If he ‘goes on in the right way’, he will mean what they do; if he does not, then he may be subject to correction by them. Now, however notoriously difficult it is to say what ‘going on in the right way’ amounts to, it cannot simply be a matter of consulting one’s own ideolectic understanding and attempting to tailor it to the meaning others have attached to that word (as exemplified in the use they make of it). For this invokes the forbidden picture of the incipient speaker privately consulting a rule or image so as to measure it against the public standard. This is just the conception that Wittgenstein warned us to resist in his arguments against the idea of a private language. Many recent expositors in the analytic traditon have pointed out that there is no temptation to regard linguistic meaning as consultative in this way, save against the background of the forbidden conception.

It is far from clear that A.J. Ayer is making this mistake, but it is best to remind ourselves of the revisions to our thinking that Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language recommends. Meaning is not a matter of contrasting a personal interpretation with that of others; it is a matter of joining in. There were many reactions the tribesmen could have taken to the drawing of a picture of a bison by one of their number: many ways, that is, of joining in. The Wittgensteinian insight is this: in the case where they did not reach for the spears, we should not automatically suppose that the one who drew the picture could console himself with the private thought, that that was what they were meant to do.

The late Professor A.J. Ayer asked – to simplify a little – how A addressed B by means of signs S with reference to object O can understand S if there were no previous agreement between A and B that S did so refer, and he offered this as a ‘fatal objection to the social interpretation of Wittgenstein’s theory of language’ (Letters, 22 June). If a non-philosopher can join the argument, this one would like to know how human infants learn the crucial distinction between a noise and a verbal sign. Like animals, infants learn to use noises (crying, gurgling) as signs because their mothers, in responding to the noise, teach them its significations. How, though, do they learn that ‘dada’ is not such a sign-noise, but a rudimentary verbal sign with specific reference? And then, how do they learn the conceptual difference between nouns (for objects) and verbs, whose range of reference is more complex? As to sentences, it is usually said that they learn to construct their own by imitating parental use. But that glosses over the way infants differ from, say, parrots, which learn a sentence (‘there’s a pretty boy’) as a string of noises. Whereas an infant manages to work out that the noise ‘is’ operates as a verbal sign in a variety of sentences radically different from what I suppose might be an initial learning model (‘that-mine’ developing into ‘that is mine’). Can philosophers explain this very mysterious achievement? That would make it easier to decide on the merits of the argument for/against the Wittgensteinian theory of language.

In your issue of 23 November 1989, my colleague Graham Martin, asking to be informed about Wittgenstein’s ‘theory of language’, begins by quoting a criticism by A.J. Ayer of this ‘theory’ of Wittgenstein’s. But Wittgenstein stated, repeatedly and emphatically, that he was not in the business of offering a theory of language, or of anything else. The philosopher’s job, he maintained, was to describe and not to explain. It follows that, unless Witgenstein was grossly mistaken about what he was doing – and there is no reason to think that he was – any objection against his ‘theory’ is fundamentally misconceived. It also follows that if Wittgenstein was right about the nature and role of philosophy (as I think he was), then Martin’s request to philosophers to explain how infants learn the differences between nouns and verbs, and so on, must go unanswered. What, after all, could such an explanation look like? Martin supposes that ‘an infant manages to work out that the noise “is” operates as a verbal sign’ from an ‘initial learning model’. But Wittgenstein rejects all theorising of this kind on the ground that it will always leave us with an unexplained datum of just the same kind as that with which we began. Thus if we say that an infant learns the use of ‘is’ from a ‘learning model’, of whatever kind, we shall still be left with the question: how does he know how that model is to be applied? The mere existence of the model would leave this question unanswered; and similarly if we postulated some further entity containing rules for the use of the model. ‘Explanations come to an end’ was one of Wittgenstein’s slogans. The difficulty is not one of lacking an explanation, but of pushing the quest for explanation to a point where it no longer makes sense.